


Reasons To Live

by mediocrityatbest



Category: Sanders Sides (Web Series)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-28
Updated: 2019-06-28
Packaged: 2020-05-28 17:35:46
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,584
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19399060
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mediocrityatbest/pseuds/mediocrityatbest
Summary: Virgil just wants to walk home and agonize over his upcoming test, but a man he’s never seen before asks him a question, and somehow it all ends up okay.





	Reasons To Live

“Why are you alive?” The question sounds idle, and it completely catches Virgil off guard. He’d just exited a building on campus - he can’t remember which, now, but he could tell you the exact spot he saw the man and heard the question - and he was heading back to his dorm. He probably wasn’t going to sleep that night, instead cramming for a psychology test the next day, but his phone was dying and it was vital he have music to study.

“What?” he asks. He glances to the side to see a man sitting on the ground, back against the concrete wall of a building. Virgil will come back the next day to see the building was the lab, and he still won’t know where he’d been coming from before the man spoke.

“Why are you alive?” the man repeats. Virgil is finally registering the question, and he is gearing up to get very mad. He’s had a hard life, and he dresses in an off-putting way, but that’s no reason he should be dead. “What reason do you have for living?” the man goes on. “What keeps you going through the day?”

Virgil pauses now. He no longer thinks this is an attack on him, but he can’t quite figure out what it  _ is _ .

“Are you okay?” he asks instead. The man turns his head and the starlight turns the lenses of his glasses silver for a moment. Beneath the glasses, the man’s eyes are dark. They could be blue or black or brown, but it’s too dark for Virgil to tell.

“I am fine,” the man says. His eyes seem to pick Virgil apart, and Virgil finds the sensation to be oddly reassuring - as though nothing he says will be deemed too weird by the man sitting in the walkway.

“It’s, uhm, a little strange. That you’re just sitting out here.” Virgil pauses. The man makes no move to respond. “Who are you?” Virgil finally says. The silence feels loaded, and he doesn’t like it.

“I am a scientist,” the man says. He tilts his head back, the stars refracting silver again, and he observes the night sky like it has secrets. Maybe it does, Virgil doesn’t know. He repeats, “I am a scientist. As such, I collect information on things I do not understand, or things I wish to know more about. Scientists also tend to be curious by nature, and though I consider myself to be very much under my own control, some queries are too demanding to be left for another time.” The man pauses, and Virgil immediately wants to break the silence. He refrains, though, because he can tell that was only part of the thought. “All the best scientists asked their questions and endeavoured to answer them, regardless of the flack they faced for doing so.” His eyes slide back to Virgil for a moment, and Virgil thinks they’re probably blue. The same shade as the sky is now. “I have been wondering, of late, why people go on. There are infinite reasons to give it up. There are so many reasons and so many irrefutable facts that make everything seem so insignificant. Why do we go on?” The man looks at Virgil directly again, his eyes unwavering. “What reasons do you have for living? What keeps you going even when you know you are so small?” Despite the phrasing and the way Virgil immediately wants to bristle, his tone is not accusatory. The man’s voice is. . .curious, certainly. Melancholic, if Virgil wants to let his inner writer interpret the situation. But nobody really uses words like melancholic anymore, so Virgil throws the thought out.

“People,” Virgil tells him, mostly because it’s true and partly because he’s not sure what else to say.

“What makes people worth living for?” The man doesn’t sound like he is surprised, or like he’s going to mock Virgil for whatever he says. He still sounds curious, and Virgil begins to wonder if the man himself has any reasons to go on. It’s a ridiculous thought, and he tries to cast it out with melancholic, but it lingers, and Virgil knows he will probably write a poem about this later. Probably using the word melancholic because somehow it fits and a little bit of poetic hubris never killed anybody.

Virgil doesn’t speak for a moment after the man’s question because he’s not sure how to word what he wants to say. “They’re. . .all different.” The words are awkward and clunky and terribly obvious, but they work. The point stands, whether or not the man knew it already.

Virgil swallows. “Each one has a story, and they are all worth knowing.” He hesitates. “A lot of people will say if you’ve met one person, you’ve met them all. But if you’ve met one person, you’ve just met that one person. No matter how many people you meet, all their stories will be different. No two are alike. And they all deserve to be known.” Virgil wishes the man would look back up at the sky. The words are harder to find when the man is watching him search.

“Is that it?” he asks. “Are the different stories all you live for? Is that what our lives are about?”

Virgil doesn’t know what to say, and he briefly considers just leaving because he’s been having a difficult enough time on his own lately, and finding reasons to live is tough. He doesn’t leave, though, because the sky is open and the air is clear and he feels a little less hopeless.

Maybe a little more hopeful.

“No,” Virgil says. “That’s not  _ it _ .”

“What else, then? What other reasons do you live for? What else is there?” Virgil almost does leave then, reconsiders staying, because he’s not sure he has another reason until it comes out of his mouth.

“Cookies.” He feels stupid now because who on earth lives for a dessert? Virgil knows he’s turning red in the dark, and he knows the man is going to laugh at him.

But he doesn’t. His head dips slightly, a silent request for Virgil to  _ go on _ . So he does.

“They’re warm when they come right out of the oven. And they’re sweet and soft. And they can make you feel better.” Virgil stops. The man keeps on looking, and Virgil doesn’t know what else there is to say about cookies. Sweet, soft, and warm. That’s about it. But the silence stretches, and the man looks like he’s waiting. Virgil finds himself pulling another sentence out, even if he’s never thought it before. “They remind me I’m not alone because I can’t bake for shit. So if I have warm cookies, it means somebody cares enough to make them for me.”

“Warm cookies and stories,” the man says. He either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care enough to comment that Virgil is definitely bright red. Virgil knows those are two very stupid ways to excuse your own existence, but they are what he has. Virgil can’t help but expect the man is going to mock him, as so many have, when he opens his mouth again. Instead, he says, “They are pleasant things. The companionship one finds in a shared food or story is wonderful. To know you are not alone is a beautiful thing.” The man smiles, if only a tiny bit. “Thank you for the reasons to live.”

Virgil blurts, “The stars,” before he can convince himself not to. Maybe it’s because the conversation feels unfinished, and maybe it’s because he thinks the man on the sidewalk needs another reason, and maybe it’s because you can never have too many reasons to live.

“I live for the stars. They’re beautiful. They shine brightly, thousands of years after they’re dead, and they give me hope. Because sometimes they look silver and sometimes they’re blue and sometimes they’re pink but they’re always astonishing. They give us light and change our perception of this world - our world, long after they’ve stopped shining, and it makes me think that maybe I can too.” Virgil stops, and he’s panting a little. The man tilts his head back again, and looks up at the sky. Virgil watches his face, and then he glances up at the stars, too. They always make him feel more alive, and important. Like maybe he’s worth the cookies and the stories.

“Perhaps,” the man says, “we are not so small.” When he smiles at the sky, Virgil feels like he’s intruding on a private moment, so he leaves. He goes home, to his dorm, and he doesn’t study all night. He sleeps, and when he wakes up the next morning, he feels a little more hopeful and a little more prepared than he has in a long time. He doesn’t write a poem about the man he met, and he doesn’t include the word melacholic in anything because that was just his inner writer running away with him, and he doesn’t speculate on who the man was. When Virgil realizes he doesn’t know the man’s name, he becomes The Scientist, and Virgil drops by the spot he met The Scientist some nights, just to see if he’s still there. Despite the fact that he never is, he is a permanent fixture in Virgil’s mind, and he imagines the man is still out there, sitting on some sidewalk somewhere else, collecting other people’s reasons to live and maybe reminding them that life is worth living, too.


End file.
